Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 1 Introduction The Bazars, or markets, are lofty stone edifices, in the form of a long gallery, for the most part very narrow, arched above, or else roofed with wood…In many of the old bazaars [the] shops are so confined as barely to leave room for the shopkeeper to display his wares, and for himself and one guest to fit conveniently. The buyers are obliged to remain standing on the outside; and, when opposite shops happen to be in full employment, it is not easy for a passenger to make his way through the crowd. Some of the modern bazars are indeed wider, and the shops much more commodious, but all are gloomy. [Russell 1969 (1756): 20] This passing remark on the great suqs (marketplaces)1 of Aleppo, Syria was published in 1756 in a massive, two-volume record of 18th century Aleppine life compiled by Alexander Russell. Russell, a Scottish doctor, served as an employee of the British-run Levant Company, which dealt in importing goods to Europe from stops along the Silk Road. The years of Russell‟s appointment in Syria (1740-1753) fell in the midst of an especially important commercial period for Aleppo, a city whose prosperity and fame came from its long-standing position as a vital medieval thoroughfare with close commercial ties to Baghdad, Cairo, and, by way of Alexandretta, Europe (Marcus 1989). As a large city in the north of the country, Aleppo was also located close to the heart of the Ottoman Empire, and, during Russell‟s stay, it was shared by Arabic-speaking citizens and Ottoman denizens alike, giving it a cosmopolitan appeal. Though Russell‟s book is focused mostly on cataloguing local medicine and disease, several chapters address the daily customs and rituals of Aleppines. It is in one of these chapters that Russell remarks upon Aleppo‟s famous marketplaces. Though the next two centuries would bring the decline of the city‟s commercial fame, Russell saw Aleppo‟s suqs at a 1 As he was writing from Ottoman-ruled Syria, Russell refers to Aleppo‟s marketplaces with the term bazaar, which, as he notes, is used in both Turkish and Farsi. I will use the Arabic word suq (pronounced sūq) in this dissertation to mean marketplace, and the Anglicized suqs (instead of the Arabic aswaaq or swaaq) to denote the plural. I provide a longer discussion of the differences between „market‟ and „marketplace‟ and on the multiple meanings of the word suq in Chapter 2. 1 time when their importance brought to the city a truly global mix of traders, artisans, merchants, and customers.2 Russell spends little more than a few pages describing Aleppo‟s marketplaces, but the passage quoted above touches upon a key question that has yet to be fully ethnographically explored: in the cramped spaces of Middle Eastern suqs, how do merchants market their goods?3 Though this question may seem simple enough, it is one that is surprisingly neglected in most studies of Middle Eastern suqs, and marketplace studies in general, be they historically, anthropologically, or economically oriented. In Syria, merchants use a range of tactics to market their merchandise to customers, and these tactics are just as reliant upon sense and sentiment, moral and social codes, religion, and aesthetics as they are upon economic logic. As such, Syrian suqs are anything but “gloomy,” as Russell would have it; rather, they contain within them a range of personalized decoration and creative marketing practices aimed at grabbing hold of the eyes, ears, and, ultimately, wallets of customers. My fieldwork was conducted in the suqs of Damascus, the present-day capital of Syria, which lies almost 200 miles to the south of Aleppo. In the busy and cramped spaces of the city‟s large marketplaces, merchants must enact a kind of visual and aural romance with their customers, wooing them with artistic displays of merchandise, shop decorations which use potent symbolic imagery, and creative auditory practices. This constellation of distinctively poetic selling practices is a function of what I call „artful marketing‟ – ways of selling which are artful both in their decorative nature and in the cunning ways they influence customers.4 In most marketplace studies, emphasis is placed on the verbal acrobatics of selling, particularly on the nature of back-and-forth bargaining 2 Russell and his half-brother Patrick (who later edited the second edition of his popular work in 1794) have been the focus of scholarly interest in the past decades due to their relatively anomalous relationship to the Middle East. They could both speak Arabic and Turkish fluently, and they participated in many of the daily rituals in Aleppo that other European travelers did not – bathing at the hamam, eating local food with Syrian friends, and conversing with Aleppines in Arabic. For an anthropological examination of the Russells, see Starkey 2002. 3 Throughout this dissertation, I use the terms „vendor,‟ „merchants,‟ „peddlers,‟ and „sellers,‟ all to refer to people who sell goods in and around Damascus‟ marketplaces. In general, I will use the word „merchant‟ as an inclusive term for all sorts of sellers in the suqs; if I use other terms, then I am referring specifically to one type of seller over another. In most cases, I will also refer to merchants with male pronouns throughout these chapters, simply because the overwhelming majority of merchants in Damascus‟ suqs is men. 4 I am in part borrowing here from Michael Herzfeld‟s (2003) discussion of the link between artisan/craft and artifice/craftiness, which, he argues, has served to create a complex identity for artisans and craftspeople in Greece. 2 sessions between merchant and customer. I show here that the unspoken, non-verbal side to marketplace transactions is, in Damascus, just as important to how the marketplace is experienced and imagined.5 My dissertation takes as its starting point the same premise upon which, thirty years ago, Geertz based his famous ethnography of the suqs in the small Moroccan town of Sefrou. For Geertz, the ultimate force driving merchants and customers alike is the search for information. As he explains, “in the bazaar information is poor, scarce, maldistributed, inefficiently communicated, and intensely valued” (1978: 29). Merchants constantly search for information about their customers in order to gauge how much to charge, when to concede a price, and what kinds of commodities they should be stocking. For their part, customers scour the suqs for the best deal, the most desirable goods, and the best merchant with whom to work. This search for information creates a push-pull balance to the suq which informs every transaction, economic or social. For the purposes of this dissertation, I am focusing on only one side of this equation: that of the information provided by merchants (and potentially used by customers). In Damascus, customers desire and need information not just about the market price of a commodity, but also about the quality of that commodity and, equally as important, about the „quality‟ of the merchant selling that commodity – whether he is respectable, pious, a participating member of Syrian society and, above all, trustworthy.6 Indeed, these two things (merchant and product quality) cannot be separated because they are mutually constitutive. It is as rare to have a conniving, socially marginal merchant consistently selling high-quality goods as it is to have a trustworthy, respectable merchant consistently selling low-quality goods.7 As such, these things can never be divorced from one another – the high quality of goods reflects the high quality of the merchant selling them; the high quality of a merchant reflects the high quality of his goods. 5 Although, technically, the aural practices I examine use words and sounds, I will explain that they do so in a way that is quite different from the dialogically oriented verbal exchanges that take place between merchant and customer. 6 Of course, these qualities can be read differently by different customers, and might not even matter to some. But, as I explain below, this is somewhat beside the point. Regardless of their reception, merchants put forth particular clues about themselves, geared toward providing customers with important information. 7 I am speaking not about the quality of the person selling these goods, but rather their quality as a seller. I‟m sure that Damascenes would agree that there are, of course, „good‟ people selling bad merchandise, and „bad‟ people selling good merchandise. But, in the marketplace, which is always full of strangers and first- time customers, merchants are usually judged upon their reputations as sellers rather than as people. 3 Before returning to this point, though, it is also important to consider the different forms that this information can take. Geertz posits that, in the Sefrou suq, information exchange operates primarily along the channels of language. Merchants and customers are constantly talking at the same time that they are deciphering others‟ words. As he puts it: “what goes on in the suq [is] mainly talk...In the suq, the flow of words and the flow of values are not two things; they are two aspects of the same thing” (Geertz 1979: 199). The verbal relay of information has also been the focus of other ethnographic studies of marketplaces, particularly Kapchan‟s (1996) fascinating study of market women‟s linguistic strategies in the Moroccan town of Beni Mellal, directly southeast of Sefrou (also, see Alexander 1987; Clark 1994; Siegel 1979). But in Damascus, to say that merchants market primarily through speech would be to paint an incomplete picture; indeed, they also rely heavily upon visual and aural practices to provide customers with information about themselves, their shops, and their products.8 In many cases, these non- verbal practices are even more effective than language in relaying such information because, as I explain in depth below, language does not have the same kind of truth- bearing properties that sight and audition do.

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